I got tabled. Completely, utterly, embarrassingly tabled.

I recently played another Warhammer game

Will brought Knights. Big, stompy, impossibly tall Knights that looked at my shambling horde of plague-ridden sons of Nurgle and laughed. Not metaphorically — I’m fairly certain I could hear the contempt radiating from the models themselves. One moment I had a battlefield teeming with bodies, poxwalkers shuffling forward in their grotesque dozens, Plague Marines oozing with purpose, Mortarion himself spreading his magnificent wings and descending upon the enemy like a plague-ridden angel of death. The next? Gone. All of it. Just Will, grinning, and a bunch of Knights that didn’t even have the decency to look damaged.

So here we are. Me, at my desk, surrounded by half-painted Death Guard miniatures and the quiet shame of a man who brought forty poxwalkers to a Knight fight and somehow still lost. Let’s talk about it.

My list, for those who want to understand the full scale of the disaster, was as follows: Mortarion, Typhus, a Lord of Contagion, two units of five Plague Marines, four… FOUR! units of ten Poxwalkers, two Deathshroud Terminator units (one led by the Lord of Contagion, one by Typhus), two Blight Haulers, a Plague Burst Crawler, a Bloat Drone with a Heavy Blight launcher, and a Rhino. On paper? Horrifying. A tide of decay and disease that should, in theory, grind anything into the dirt through sheer attrition and stubbornness.

In practice? Will’s Knights ate my Poxwalkers for breakfast, laughed at my Plague Marines for lunch, and then had Mortarion for dessert before I’d even had a chance to properly threaten anything meaningful.

Here’s the thing about Death Guard that I am only now, through the sacred ritual of getting absolutely battered, beginning to understand: we are not fast. We are not fragile, supposedly, and yet against Knights the damage output on those big lads is so catastrophic that “tough” becomes a relative term very quickly. My Poxwalkers, bless their rotting hearts, exist to be an annoyance. A wall. A speed bump. Against a Knight army that can simply stride over speed bumps and stomp them into a fine paste, the strategy of “overwhelm them with bodies” runs into a rather fundamental problem — Knights don’t care about bodies.

And Mortarion. Oh, Mortarion. My beloved Daemon Primarch. My guy. Did I charge him directly at a Knight on turn one? Yes. Did I lose him embarrassingly early as a result of that decision? Also yes. Would I do it again without a single moment of hesitation? ABSOLUTELY I WOULD. There is something deeply, almost spiritually correct about watching a seven-foot plague-daemon with a massive scythe hurl himself at a thirty-foot war machine with the energy of a man who has fully accepted his fate. That’s not a tactical error. That’s a lifestyle choice. That’s Death Guard in its purest form.

But fine. FINE. Let’s extract some learnings from the wreckage, shall we?

The Deathshroud are brilliant and I didn’t use them brilliantly. Sat behind Typhus and the Lord of Contagion, they’re genuinely terrifying in melee — but they need to actually GET to melee, which against Knights is easier said than done when your big scary Primarch has already drawn every gun on the board by sprinting forward like an overexcited labrador. Screening matters. Positioning matters. Apparently.

The Plague Burst Crawler, the Blight Haulers, and the Bloat Drone are doing real work at range — but they need time to do it, and time is something you don’t have when forty Poxwalkers are evaporating turn by turn and suddenly there’s nothing between your artillery and a very annoyed Knight Crusader.

The Rhino, to its credit, did what Rhinos do. It existed. It died. Respect.

What I think I’m learning, slowly, painfully, one tabling at a time; is that Death Guard want to dictate pace and they cannot dictate pace against an army that simply hits harder and faster. Against Knights, I needed to be smarter about what I was sacrificing and when, using those Poxwalker blobs not just as a tide but as deliberate, calculated screens that protect the things that can actually threaten big targets. The Deathshroud want to be in the Knight’s face. Mortarion wants to be in the Knight’s face. Getting them there intact is the puzzle.

I haven’t solved it yet. But I will. And until then, I’ll keep charging Mortarion at things that are objectively too big for him to fight, because some hills, or in this case, some plague-ridden Daemon Primarchs, are worth dying on.

Nurgle provides. Even if right now, all he’s providing is humbling defeat and a better understanding of what not to do.

The rot continues. Onward.